Queensland Ballet and Bangarra premiere new works
A dance adaptation of a beloved Miles Franklin novel falls short of brilliant, while Frances Rings delivers a thrilling new work for Bangarra.
Bangarra Dance Theatre lives and breathes stories of this land. Roaming through time and space it offers a different way of looking at history and place. It opens hearts. It expands minds.
New artistic director Frances Rings continues this great work with Yuldea. It takes us beyond the Nullarbor to that most precious of resources, a waterhole that nurtured every aspect of traditional life until colonists sucked it dry in the service of building a railway.
It was then a short hop to atomic tests at Maralinga. Displacement to soul-destroying missions was part of the dismal picture. The beauty of Yuldea, though, is its fundamental belief in the healing power of kin, country and the numinous. The work ends in a flood of optimistic light.
Rings depicts a huge cycle of creation, destruction and renewal. The stunning opening shows nothing less than the convulsive death of a star before the calm of Yooldil Kapi, the claypan waterhole ever-present in Elizabeth Gadsby’s design as a glowing semicircle. Behind it is a vast curved curtain of streamers with a life of its own, revealing and concealing under Karen Norris’s superb lighting.
The dance-making is thrilling. Traditional shapes are seen in her choreography but Rings has a strong contemporary sensibility too, seen unforgettably in duos for water spirits, red mallee and at Maralinga, and there’s a solo for Rikki Mason, tortured by atomic fallout.
Bangarra has never shied away from a big idea and it’s clear Rings isn’t taking a backwards step, doing it her way as the company goes through its own cycle of renewal.
Working in an entirely different tradition, British choreographer Cathy Marston has made literary adaptations a cornerstone of her work. My Brilliant Career, the closing work in Queensland Ballet’s triple bill Trilogy, joins the illustrious company of Jane Eyre, Dangerous Liaisons, Of Mice and Men and Lady Chatterley’s Lover among others.
Miles Franklin’s novel, published in 1901, has at its centre a loveable but maddening creature with outsized desires. Sybylla Melvyn is a clever, funny, rebellious, complicated young woman who has aspirations to greatness and lives in a world too small for her ambitions.
Somewhat ironically and unfortunately, Sybylla in Marston’s dance version is also put into a straitjacket. This Brilliant Career feels at odds with its source, contained and often opaque where Franklin’s Sybylla is passionate and unflinchingly direct.
Marston splits Sybylla in two to represent her undeniable contradictions but despite the lovely rapport between Mia Heathcote (Syb, who wants to be loved) and Laura Toser (unconventional Bylla), neither is terribly interesting. Sybylla’s scratchy vigour isn’t strengthened by being doubled; it’s diluted.
The two-faces-of-Sybylla approach may well have worked had My Brilliant Career not fallen between two stools. It’s neither pure abstraction that gets deeply inside Sybylla’s psyche nor fully fleshed narrative that tells a detailed story.
There’s a decent sense of place via David Fleischer’s design and Matthew Hindson’s score but the unusual 45-minute length is telling. The piece is at once too long and too short. It ends up being about a girl in two minds who knocks back a boy who loves her. What brilliant career she aspires to remains unknown.
Trilogy opens with the super-moody, elusive A Brief Nostalgia by the ever-watchable young Brisbane choreographer Jack Lister. Its muscular introspection is followed by Christopher Bruce’s Rooster, a jeux d’esprit from 1991 to Rolling Stones songs. Sheer joy.
Yuldea. Bangarra Dance Theatre, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, June 15. Ends July 15 then tours to Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Bendigo until October.
Trilogy. Queensland Ballet, Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane, June 16. Ends June 25.